Bess Darrell is brought to the Tower. No one raises an eyebrow over it, since all Gertrude’s women are questioned. Bess is her angel self: her golden hair, her eyes of cornflower blue. She gives him facts on paper, letters she has copied. She gives him samples of treason embroidered: the pansy for Pole, the marigold for Mary. But when he has done with her she asks, ‘What now? Must I go back and live amongst these people? What shall I say, when they ask me what I told Cromwell?’
‘Say you told me your dreams.’
They set great store by dreams, these families. They are always writing them down under seal and sending them to each other by fast courier. Many nights, it seems, they dream the king is dead. Sometimes they dream Jane Seymour comes in her shroud, to tell the king she hates him and he is damned.
He says, ‘You cannot go back among the Courtenays because they will not exist. When you leave here you will go to Allington.’
She looks up. ‘And what will I do there?’
‘Live and make no stir.’
‘You will bring Wyatt home?’
He nods. ‘Though I cannot say when.’
‘They say the king is not satisfied with him.’
‘He is not satisfied with any of us.’
He thinks, we do not even know that Wyatt is still alive. But I trust his skill in locating his peril and moving away from it. Or not, if stasis is best: Wyatt stood while a lioness stalked him.
Bess Darrell says, ‘Lord Montague calls England a prison. He says it has been a prison these last six years.’
‘Too kind a gaol for him to leave,’ he says. ‘They sicken me. They are cowards. If he had flown across the sea to Reginald, at least I would respect him. He would have shown himself a man, to be taken under arms.’
‘It would have made your task easier,’ Bess says. ‘No doubt of their treason then. But apart from what I have supplied, you have nothing but Geoffrey’s nonsense, and hearsay and rumour and kitchen boys’ gossip. They will not oblige you, Montague and Exeter, unless you rip their treason out of them, and you cannot do that.’
‘I am very ingenious,’ he says sadly. ‘And your testimony is a great help.’
‘But think, my lord. If you call a traitor everyone who has voiced a dislike of the king or his proceedings, who does that leave alive?’
‘Me,’ he says. Henry and Cromwell. Cromwell and Henry.
‘Exeter thinks the world will turn,’ Bess says. ‘He knows Henry is afraid of excommunication. He thinks a show of force will bring him back to Rome.’
‘He will not turn,’ he says. ‘Too much has been said and done in England. The king cannot resist change even if he would. Let me live another year or two, and I will make sure what we have done can never be undone, not by any power on earth. And even if Henry does turn, I will not turn. I will make good my cause in my own person. I am not too old to take a sword in my hand.’
‘You would take arms against Henry?’ She seems entertained, more than shocked.
‘I did not say that.’
She looks down at her hands, wearing Wyatt’s ring. ‘Oh, I think you did.’
Mid-November: with the first foul weather, you may witness a Cambridge man, a priest, committing a slow public suicide. One man, taking on the king: one puny challenger against the giant, his person small as a crumb, his weapons straw.
His name is John Lambert, though he was born Nicholson. He was ordained priest, and knew Little Bilney, who converted him to the gospel. He went to Antwerp, chaplain to the English merchants; his path crossed every dangerous path, Tyndale’s included. Thomas More, he says, tricked him back to England. Then old Archbishop Warham – Canterbury, that was – hauled him up for heresy, charging him in forty-five articles, which he rebutted. Yes, he admitted, he had studied Luther’s work, and he found himself the better man for it. He agreed with Luther that it was lawful for a priest to marry. The question of free will, he called too hard a matter for a simple man. But he believed only Christ, not priests, could forgive sin. Scripture has all we need, he said. We do not need the extra rules Rome has made up.
In the middle of the hearing, Warham died. The case was allowed to lapse. But the passage of four, five years has not made Lambert cautious. At Austin Friars – no clerks present, no record kept – Thomas Cranmer has reasoned with him. He, Thomas Cromwell, has argued with him fiercely. And Robert Barnes has stood by, his face pinched with dislike and fear: bursting out at last, ‘You – whatever you call yourself – Lambert, Nicholson – you will ruin us all.’
Cranmer had said, ‘We do not quarrel with your views –’
‘Yes, we do,’ Barnes said.
‘Well then, we do – but the chief thing is, be circumspect. Be patient.’
‘What, wait till you crawl in my direction? Play the man, Cranmer, stand up for the truth. You know it now, in your heart.’
Barnes says, ‘Lambert, you question baptism itself –’
‘There is baptism in the scriptures. But not of infants.’
‘– and you question the eucharist, the sacrament of the altar. Now, if you do that, if you do it openly, I cannot protect you and I will not, and he,’ he points to the archbishop, ‘will not, and he,’ – he points to the Lord Privy Seal – ‘he will not either.’
‘I tell you what I will do,’ Lambert says. ‘I will spare you torment. I will go over your heads. I will put my case to the king himself. He is head of the church. Let Henry judge me.’
The king – let no man be astonished – has risen to the challenge. At Whitehall he will debate with Lambert in public. ‘Cromwell, are the ambassadors coming?’
Europe calls the king a heretic – so now let Europe see and hear him defend our common faith. Pole asserts he is inferior in learning to men like More and Fisher, the blessed dead. He will show the contrary. Rows of benches are set out for the spectators.
‘Pray God the king does not get a fall,’ Rafe Sadler says. ‘Lambert is a student of languages. He can cite the scriptures in tongues ancient and modern.’
He is rueful. ‘I always told the king, English is enough.’
He thinks, for every point Lambert scores, I will smart.
He has done his best to deter Henry from putting on this show. He does not need to answer Lambert, he tells him – he has bishops to take care of it. But Henry is not listening. It is only the day before the debate that he senses the discomfort of his advisers. ‘What, do you fear for me? I am well able for any heretic. And I must carry the torch of faith high, where my friends and enemies can see it.’
He says, and when will your Majesty begin to carry it? ‘About noon,’ Henry says. ‘And by twilight we should be done.’
Early on the morning of the hearing, he receives Lisle’s wife, over from Calais. There is no one, other than Stephen Gardiner, whom he would less like to see before breakfast.
He knows Lady Lisle dislikes him. She dislikes what he is – a jack-in-office – and makes him feel that his manner, his address, gives him away as a pot-boy. All the same, she chatters gaily about the terms on which she will sell him her Gloucestershire property. You would think all was merry in Calais; she does not mention the stream of disaffected informants who roll up to his various houses, some of them still green from the sea-crossing. She does not mention the folk in custody at the Tower, though surely they are cousins of hers; all these people are related. Only she says, ‘I hear you are busy, Lord Cromwell. Never too busy to get land, are you? I said to my husband, depend upon it, Cromwell will make time for me. He wants what I have.’
‘How is my lord Lisle? John Husee says he is melancholy.’
‘It would cheer him to have reward for long service.’
‘The king has offered him two hundred pounds a year.’
‘I would it were four hundred.’
He suppresses a smile. ‘I will ask. I promise nothing.’
‘If the king speeds well with the heretic, he will be in a giving humour come this evening. Well,’ she gets up, ‘I must speed away myself. The sooner I am back in Calais, the better my lord will like it. He says he would rather lose a hundred pounds than spend a week without me.’